I don’t know about the cores, but I have the freezes happening as well.
Every 20 second the sound suddenly starts looping and afterwards the game freezes for about 1 minute. In one cutscene, it happened 4 times!
Strangely, when the game freezes, my hard drive makes a short sound a few second after the freeze and a few seconds before the freeze stops.
I have those freezes as well, especially since talmberg. There are areas where you can provoke those freezes and reply them again and again (on the watchtower for example). Those freezes can last about 5 seconds!!
i5 3570k, GTX 970, 8 GB RAM. Settings don’t play a role, it happens every time when I am in Talmberg.
Can last about 5 seconds 
? You lucky SOB!
These freezes last for more than a minute for me!
I upgraded from Windows 7 to 10 and ran around for about 30 minutes. The freezing seems to be gone.
Hm, damn. Tried to push that move as far away from me as possible… Guess I will have to look into upgrading myself, see if that helps. Has to be done at some point anyway.
Is it complicated, upgrading? Never did that, only ever got new Windows when I bought new PC’s.
It was easy, took about an hour. I downloaded and ran the ISO from this page:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO
Might have to reinstall some drivers afterwards but it’ll keep all of your files.
Thanks, will give it a try.
Are you going to install Win 10? If so, could you report if this helped you or not?
I will report!
Thanks @tinklepee, the upgrade from Win 7 to 10 did the job and the freezes are gone. Game is playable now 
Hope this works. Giving it a shot. Thank you for the tip.
I’ve played approx. 6 hours yesterday and only ran into 2 of the freezes, both lasting about 2 seconds. I was getting these same freezes every few minutes before. My overall fps is higher as well but not by much.
Windows 10 is kind of weird. I noticed that if you turn off Windows Defender’s realtime protection and it’s firewall portion that it actually increases the CPU usage of Windows services (svchost, etc.). Seems counterintuitive but I’d leave those running for the best performance.
Same here, still some rare but very short freezes. Nothing in comparison to the previous ones though. Really happy about your tip.
Thank you, tinklepee for a more radical solution. Seems to be working, so far. Would have waited days, maybe weeks for a patch to fix this. Going to delete all saves to this point and start again. Thanks VERY much.
Any solution for those who stuck with win 8 ? =((
Same problem here.
The game runs smoothly for 3-4 minutes after boot and begins to lock up and freeze suddenly for anywhere between 30 seconds and 5 minutes. Then it will run smoothly for 5-60 seconds and do it again, indefinitely. Settings and current in-game situation have no effect. My video card HUD clocks me using only 50-70% of the GPU, using only 1.3 Gb of 2.0Gb of VRAM with an average of 60fps. I’m also getting the CPU spike during the freezes. I also never go over 8Gb of regular RAM usage.
I also noticed that “Fullscreen” makes it very noticeably worse than “Borderless” does.
Unfortunately I’m not willing to “upgrade” to Win 10, so that’s not a solution.
i5 4570 3.2 Ghz X4
16Gb DDR3 RAM
GTX 770 2Gb GDDR5
Win 7
All drivers are updated
It’s a great game otherwise! Good job Warhorse!
I might have found a solution for those of you using an Nvidia GPU!
This worked 9/10 for me. I still have little baby freezes that feel more like momentary glitches, and they happen so far apart I forget it’s a problem sometimes.
Also running in “Borderless” as opposed to “Fullscreen” helped a bunch.
Hope that helps some people!
Sadly, I already tried that, didn’t help.
Also, the freezes happen just as often when playing in Windowed mode, will try Borderless now nevertheless. Doubt that alone will help, though…
Thx for that hint. It kinda helped me, allthough I still get freezes from time to time.
Tried to upgrade to Windows 10 but that`s another story 
Borderless is bad for framerate though, I was getting 20-40 in borderless and I’m now at 30-50 in Windowed mode.
